A conventional navigation apparatus on a vehicle displays a wide variety of facility names such as parks together with road names and the like besides address names (an administrative section name) such as prefecture names, city/town/village names and the like on a roadmap. In this manner, a user can obtain information to identify a nearby facility, each of the roads as well as an area where the vehicle is located. However, a display position of those names is predetermined in the roadmap data, and thus each of those names is displayed at a predetermined display position.
For a user operating a vehicle, an address name and a facility name are the information which is necessary for, for example, knowing the location which the vehicle currently is traveling. However, when the user operates the vehicle, an approximate path to reach to a desired destination is determined, and the vehicle most likely travels along the approximate path under control of the user. In this case, each of the road names rather than an address name and a facility name are treated as more important information. This is because the user usually determines which of many roads should be taken for traveling along the predetermined approximate path based primarily on the road names.
However, the user does not have to grasp all of the road names displayed on the navigation apparatus. That is, the user can travel along the predetermined approximate path to the destination when he/she can at least determine which road should the vehicle go into after passing a currently traveling road.